Reporting Under Fire (22 page)

Through the 1970s and '80s, Gee Gee traveled the troubled world. She reported on Chile's wild ride through an American-style democracy followed by a Marxist government and then a military dictatorship. In Bolivia she investigated the death of
the legendary Marxist rebel Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The charismatic Che, second only to Castro in revolutionary glory, had tried to rally Bolivia's indigenous peasants for revolution.

After talking with scores of people, including Che's now imprisoned compatriots, Gee Gee concluded that Che had made a giant miscalculation; Bolivia's peasants were nationalists, and many had served in the Bolivian army. Gee Gee talked with people who had known Che on two continents, and she concluded that he was suicidal, that he'd had a death wish, pure and simple. Just the same, she was chilled when a doctor showed her the evidence of his death. The Bolivians had claimed they shot him, but the doctor had kept Che's bloody shirt. He'd been stabbed with a bayonet and a machete; the bullets had followed.

In 1967 Gee Gee went to Moscow when the Cold War was two decades old and hundreds of Soviet nuclear missiles were aimed at American cities. She followed the trail that Peggy Hull, Bessie Beatty, and Rheta Childe Dorr had taken half a century earlier, riding the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok westward. Along the way she met and interviewed scores of Soviet citizens, from Uzbek farmers to young Muscovites who danced in underground discos. Usually they didn't talk openly. “You learn what is real by pauses and coughs,” she wrote. Sometimes a small look or comment encouraged Gee Gee to pry a bit with questions, and an interviewee would spill his or her guts.

Russia was a “torment for any honest journalist.” Gee Gee came away convinced that the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, from top to bottom, operated under a code of dishonesty. These people had their souls “hidden deep.” In a society where the totalitarian government controlled every part of people's lives from cradle to grave, ordinary men and women
couldn't tell the difference between an honest statement and a dishonest one. After all, if the government dictated what was “true,” then how could a person know what was real and what was a lie? And how could someone live that way?

It was in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, where she nearly died when a television commentator attacked her. Gee Gee always followed a set of her own rules when she traveled alone, living in hotels and dining in restaurants. She was careful not to appear anything but a professional when dealing with strange men in order to stay out of harm's way. Of course, she was hit on from time to time, and Gee Gee noticed that Russian men were especially loutish in their behavior toward women. They didn't even use pick-up lines—they simply lunged.

One day Gee Gee spoke with a well-known television commentator, and after a pleasant interview, she allowed him to buy her an inexpensive dinner. Half an hour later he knocked on her hotel room door, and Gee Gee, thinking it was her female guide, answered it. The TV man, drunk and ugly-faced, attacked her, and when she screamed and fought back, he beat her savagely. He left only after Gee Gee “agreed” to sleep with him when he came to Chicago. By then, she would say anything to get him to stop hitting her.

The next morning, when Gee Gee tried to complain to the authorities, she learned that the newsman had bribed everyone at the hotel to say nothing. She complained to the American embassy, where “her friends” listened to her story and hinted with leering questions that she might have come on to her attacker. When she heard the news, even her own mother said, “Dear, I'm surprised it hasn't happened to you sooner.” Gee Gee began to feel shame and asked herself if she actually was guilty, that “good girls” didn't get themselves attacked. And when she came back to Chicago, no one in the office said a word except for
the legendary
Daily News
columnist Mike Royko, who observed that if a Russian woman reporter had been beaten up in the US, “it would be around the world in five minutes.”

When Gee Gee launched her career as a foreign correspondent in the 1960s, it was unusual for reporters to be targeted. In 2012, after journalist Marie Colvin died in Syria and CBS correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and nearly killed by a mob in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Gee Gee reflected on how things had changed over 50 years:

When I went to Latin America, and then to the Middle East, Asia, the Soviet Union, most groups believed in the Geneva Accords, i.e. that journalists were protected non-combatants, like nurses, rescue workers, and people in general who were not armed to fight. Even the Vietcong generally obeyed these rules—the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia did not. That world changed.

Otherwise, I was very careful to dress conservatively, to be respectful of culture, etc. I would, for instance, have worn a hijab or long black robe if I were going into Tahrir Square in Cairo at the height of the revolution there.

But then, I'm not sure that would have really helped, because there you had these Islamic fanatics who would attack any woman. This has completely changed since my days. In 1974 for instance, I went to Saudi Arabia the first time, and I had little problem walking through the markets in a loose dress. Today I am sure that would not be possible.

I would advise young women to cover areas, not events, and to cover them when there is not war or revolution. This way, you get a true sense of the people and you are safer. But—it
is
a different world.

Gee Gee Geyer met “a whole wonderful lineup of men in my life—and of all different types. The Cuban diplomat, the famous Russian leader, the Washington bureau chief, the environmentalist, the Hungarian I worked with at the border during the breakout of 1956 when I was in Vienna, the incredible security agent who worked on the Mafia.” She came close to marrying Keyes Beech, the well-regarded veteran reporter at the
Chicago Daily News;
but Gee Gee feared she would lose her personal sovereignty and spirit in a marriage, and she asked herself how she could manage both a career and a family. Her question would become a timeless one for women who traveled for work and left children at home.

She made the tough decision not to marry and had other choices to think about. In 1975, Gee Gee left the
Daily News
to become a columnist. The prospect seemed daunting, writing three columns a week and hoping that they'd be syndicated widely enough for her to make a living. Her first syndicate editor mandated that Gee Gee couldn't write columns about foreign affairs or about women, until a sympathetic woman editor helped her slip them in. In time she felt free to write about whatever was on her mind. Time and travel had armed her with the ability to write knowledgeably about nearly anything.

Georgie Anne Geyer continues to watch and write about the world for American newspapers.
Courtesy of Georgie Anne Geyer

Now free to live where she wished, Gee Gee moved to Washington and adopted a stray a cat for company. Pasha, “a direct descendant of the Egyptian godcats,” so enthralled Gee Gee that she wrote a book about these handsome creatures who populate an independent feline world. In 1983 she wrote on a different subject: herself. In
Buying the Night Flight,
Gee Gee recounted the story of her childhood and the first 25 years of her career as a correspondent. She took her title from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's
Night Flight,
a classic tale of a man facing his fears and the “sense of serenity and sovereignty and peace” that one must earn after making the hard choices that life brings.

Georgie Anne Geyer has continued to write about the world from places such as Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Point to a spot on the map where the United States was fighting some kind of war, and Geyer would be there. Over the years, she would write more than 10,000 newspaper columns, distilling her observations and conclusions into 700 words each.

As of her 78th year, when this book was written, Georgie Anne Geyer was still writing three columns per week. When she looked back on her long career, certain memories stood out:

Strange things. Meeting a wonderful Panamanian couple, he the editor of the greatest paper in Panama and driven into exile by [Manuel] Noriega, in a dining room after Noriega fell, and laughing and crying with them. Watching my favorite country, Oman, come from a desert-f of nothing in 1978 to such intelligent development today that, in October of 2011, I attended the opening of Sultan
Qaboos' Royal Opera House with Plácido Domingo conducting. Seeing China changing before my eyes after 1984. Watching the Berlin Wall come down and Eastern Europe, freed, and seeing the “Great Communist Empire” in shards. Seeing Lebanon at the height of its beauty in the early '70s. Getting through to Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and the Guatemalan guerrillas—most of all, it is this joyous sense of doing something that no one else has or can do, of breaking through walls and barriers, of speaking other languages as though you were a bird in flight. And bringing it all home to my paper and my people.

E
arly in 1992 the United States and European community recognized the newly independent nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly part of communist Yugoslavia. The small country was home to three ethnic groups with ties to people in other Balkan nations: Croats (Roman Catholic Croatians), Serbs (Orthodox Serbians), and Muslims known as Bosniaks.

Within days Serbian paramilitary forces launched artillery attacks on Sarajevo, Bosnia's lovely capital, and blockaded the city. The Bosnian Serbs, assisted by Serbs from the Yugoslavian army, embarked on a murderous program of genocide, what they called “ethnic cleansing” as they drove Bosnia's Muslims from their homes across two-thirds of Bosnia. More fighting arose when Croats and Bosniaks also turned on each other in 1992, but their battles ended early in 1994 when they agreed to peace terms. However, the Serbs kept fighting.

The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords established a framework for peace among the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. United Nations forces arrived to enforce the peace agreement, especially among Serb forces who resisted. The Serbs kept up their siege of Sarajevo until February 1996.

Late in the 1990s, ethnic Albanians called Kosovars (mostly Muslims who lived in the Serbian province of Kosovo) formed the Kosovo Liberation Army to create an independent Kosovo. The Serbian Orthodox Church has many sacred sites based in Kosovo, and Serbia considered the province vital to its sovereignty. The Kosovars carried out attacks against Serbian police stations, and in 1998, the Serbian government responded with a wave of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovars.

The United States recognized Kosovo as a nation in 2008, but China and Russia have not.

When I look at war, I don't see military strategies. I see it from the micro level: how is this affecting families, schools, hospitals? I think of supply routes and water tanks and how people get through a winter without electricity and antibiotics.

—Janine di Giovanni

Sometimes a kid just feels different, that she doesn't fit in. She grows up in a big New Jersey family with seven children. As she
gets older, she starts to realize that her family has secrets and doesn't talk about unpleasant things, such as the sister who died 10 years before the girl was born or the brothers who hide their drugs in the attic. After all, if you don't talk about problems, then they don't exist.

But Janine di Giovanni, the last child born into her family in the mid-1960s, didn't want to live a life denying things. Plus she wanted to learn as much as she could about other people. She started by writing a high school research paper on the Hopi Tribe of Arizona. She knew she had a gift for writing, so she went to study English at the University of Maine. Like a painter with brush to canvas or a singer who masters a tricky passage of music, her passion was to create—with words on a page.

After graduating, she was awarded a slot in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a coveted spot awarded to only 40 writers each year. But life in Iowa was a lonely existence—she was far younger than her classmates, many of them published authors with long lists of books to their credit, and the competition and petty jealousies discouraged her. She quit the program, taking with her one key discovery: writing, she learned, is an “isolated profession. You're going to spend a lot of time by yourself and face a lot of rejection.” Somewhere along the line she got the idea to be a foreign correspondent.

Janine moved to Boston and got a job as a beat reporter at a local paper covering the daily round of fires, checking the police blotter, and writing up the dry but vital reports of council meetings and school board news. She faced years of working her way up the ladder toward becoming a foreign correspondent for a US news outlet, so she made a jump. In Europe, she decided, there was an appreciation for people like her, individuals who were “eccentric and out-of-the-box as opposed to the United States where people are far more conventional.” So she moved. She
and her then-husband, a photographer, set up house in London. Janine talked an editor into paying for her airfare, and she flew to Israel to get her first story as a foreign correspondent, talking with Palestinians who were in revolt against the government.